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Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976) worked relentlessly, never leaving New York but for a brief stay in Hollywood, of all places. He was admired by Pound and Kenneth Burke, and often published his own works; in the Depression era, he managed a treadle printing press in his basement. He wrote three sorts of poems: exceptionally short imagistic lyrics; longer pieces crafted and cobbled from other sources, often from the Judaic tradition; and book-length poems wrought from the testimony both of Holocaust trials and from the courtrooms of turn-of-the-century America. Two of these full-length volumes were indeed titled "Testimony," as was an earlier prose work; it was a word that kept him close company. When asked late in life to define his poetry, it was not the word he chose.
"Objectivist," he wrote, naming his longstanding group, and mimicking poetic style with a single prose sentence: "images clear but the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details and the music of the verse; words pithy and plain; without the artifice of regular meters; themes, chiefly Jewish, American, urban." If the sentence sounds hard-won, this is perhaps because it was. Four decades earlier, he wrote in a letter to friends, "There is a learned article about my verse in Poetry this month, from which I learn that I am an objectivist." The learned fellow was Louis Zukofsky, brilliant eminence of the Objectivists, "with whom I disagree as to both form and content of verse, but to whom I am obliged for placing some of my things here and there." So read Reznikoff's conclusion in 1931, with its fillip of polite resentment.
Movements and schools are arbitrary and immaterial things by which poetic history is told. This must have rankled Reznikoff, who spent his writing life tracing the material and the necessary.
Born a child of immigrants in Brooklyn in 1894, he was in journalism school at 16, took a law degree at 21. Though he was little interested in legal practice, the ideas would be near the heart of his writing. Ideal poetic language, he wrote, "is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law." If this suggests a congenital optimism about the law, it made for astonishingly care-filled poetry. Reznikoff is unsurpassed in conveying the sense that the world is worth getting right. Not the glorious or the damaged world, but the world that is everything that is the case. Reznikoff's faith in the facts of the case takes on an intensity no less social than spiritual, no greater when surveying the Old Testament than New York. This collection gathers all his poems (but for those already book-length) by the technique of compressing onto single pages as many as five or six at a time. This can lessen the force; each is a sort of American haiku, though no more impressionistic than a hand-operated printing press. One such, numbered 69 in the volume "Jerusalem the Golden," runs in its length: "Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies / a girder, still itself among the rubbish." This exemplary couplet is sometimes taken to represent Reznikoff's poetry itself, immutable and certain amid the transitory.
6. By saying "it was a word that kept him close company" (8th line, 1st para.), the author implies .
[A] Charles Reznikoff always wrote works about testimony.
[B] Charles Reznikoff was always involved in the testimony affairs.
[C] Charles Reznikoff liked to write testimony.
[D] Charles Reznikoff is a busy lawyer.
7. Reznikoff's attitude to the fact that he was grouped as objectivist is .
[A] approval
[B] indifference
[C] opposition
[D] suspicion
8. The word "rankled" (2nd line, 3rd para.) probably means .
[A] interested
[B] Angered
[C] Pleased
[D] Consoled
9. We can learn from the 4th paragraph that .
[A] Reznikoff liked to learn law.
[B] Reznikoff was more interested in spiritual world than in social world.
[C] It is astonishing that Reznikoff wrote care-filled poetry.
[D] Reznikoff was greatly influenced by his legal experience in his poetry writing.
10. By citing the poem in the last paragraph, the author intends to .
[A] show that the force is lessoned in this way
[B] show that the poem is not impressionistic
[C] show that the poem is immutable
[D] show that the poem is compressed
